Mobile communication systems continue to grow in popularity and have become an integral part of both personal and business communications. Various mobile devices now incorporate Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) features such as calendars, address books, task lists, calculators, memo and writing programs, media players, games, etc. These multi-function devices usually allow users to send and receive electronic mail (email) messages wirelessly and access the internet via a cellular network and/or a wireless local area network (WLAN), for example. In addition, these devices may allow users to send Short Messaging Service (SMS) messages, Personal Identification Number (PIN) messages, and instant messages.
In some situations, a sender may desire a quick answer or response to a message that the sender has sent to a recipient, but may not receive it in a timely fashion because the recipient was unavailable. Had the sender known of the recipient's unavailability to provide a quick answer before sending the message, the sender may have chosen to not send the message, or may have chosen to contact the recipient via in alternate method (i.e. send an e-mail instead of a SMS or PIN message), which would have saved time and effort.
While some devices allow a user to manually set an availability status to be broadcast to the wireless network (which in turn broadcasts it to that user's contacts) via a keypad or trackball, somewhat alleviating the above situation by informing the user's contacts of the user's availability status, situations may occur where the user forgets (or does not have the time) to manually update their availability status.
Therefore, further improvements in wireless communications devices capable of communicating an availability status to the wireless network are desirable.